2022-03-08
A writer and transient farmer chronicles multiple seasons of work and life.
In her debut memoir, spanning four years of her life, Gaydos proceeds chronologically according to the season. Early on, she introduces Graham, an old friend and painter with whom she began a romantic relationship; that bond forms a constant amid the temporary settings of her jobs. Gaydos clearly loves Graham, as she also loves writing and her family, but they are secondary to the work she has chosen. Despite her other loves, “there is the problem that I am promised to the farm.” Each of the farms where she has worked may have different specialties in different locations, but they are alike in their rural settings, menial pay, and painstaking labor. Gaydos describes the realities of farm life with honest precision, neither indulging in unnecessary dramatizing nor shying away from the numerous harsh realities. “The rooster named Commander succumbs to the breeding of flies,” she writes. “He is under the care of the three-year-old….Commander isn’t getting better. One day the farmer takes him out of his cage and cuts off his head with a shovel, [a] compassionate act.” The most affecting passages focus on the people the author met in the communities where she has lived. Gaydos describes an evening spent at the Lebanon Valley Speedway’s annual Eve of Destruction demolition derby event, a spectacle that was marred by the death of a driver a few years prior, killed when his RV collapsed upon impact with a Jeep. Despite the tragedy, “a lot of people wanted to keep the show going….Someone in town told me…that people die what seems like every other year on this track.” The incident illustrates in dramatic fashion what Gaydos paints in broad strokes throughout her book, a complex and fraught portrait of a lifestyle that is simultaneously protective, precarious, and resistant to change.
Lyrical and cleareyed insight into farming from a writer devoted to both crafts.
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
“Gaydos describes in lyrical and unflinching detail the processes behind our food. . . . In Gaydos’s soft and honest delivery, the struggles and joys of life — plant, human, animal — come across as neither graphic nor gratuitous, but simply real.”—Sebastian Modak, The New York Times
“Evocative . . . Gaydos offers what, at first, reads like a straightforward catalogue of farm life. . . . But the tranquil simplicity belies a deeper purpose. . . . Our dominion over nature, it becomes clear, is incomplete.”—The New Yorker
“Gaydos brings her experience farming, in particular breeding animals for slaughter, to a debut that’s in turns lyrical and brutal. . . . It all adds up to a powerful meditation on the cycle of life. . . . This one will stick with readers long after the last page is turned.”—Publishers Weekly
“What this young writer has given us is more of a memento mori, rendering realistic scenes full of vivid and sometimes bizarre detail, always with an acknowledgment — on the surface or just under it — of the inescapable facts that life entails death, and growth, and arises from decay. . . . The overall effect is of access and intimacy; Gaydos lets us into her world, and we follow her to the worthy and unforgiving place where nature and agriculture meet.”—Kristin Kimball, The New York Times
“A poetic meditation on fertility, loss and the farmworkers who eke out a marginal living as long as they can. It’s a narrative that evokes the pleasures and perils of life and work on a small farm. . . . Gaydos’ close eye on the natural world allows us to vividly see the cycle of a farm’s blossoming and dying seasons.”—Sarah McCraw Crow, BookPage
“Sure to be a bestseller . . . Masterful, rapturously refreshing, and immersive writing . . . An ode to pig farming that waxes poetic in its simple majesty; readers will revel in the beautiful imagery and lyricism of this tribute to farm life. . . . Gaydos’s narration is so beautiful and omniscient, it feels less like a farmer’s almanac than a guided meditation. . . . Her clean linen language and sophisticated writing style is sure to move readers as it turns a pigsty into an oasis and a sunburn into a warm weather kiss. Readers will fall in love with Gaydos’s humble commitment to feeding her soul through farming. More than a memoir; it’s a sensory experience.”—Alana R. Quarles, Library Journal
“Lyrical and cleareyed insight into farming from a writer devoted to both crafts . . . Gaydos describes the realities of farm life with honest precision, neither indulging in unnecessary dramatizing nor shying away from the numerous harsh realities. . . . A complex and fraught portrait of a lifestyle that is simultaneously protective, precarious, and resistant to change.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Pig Years . . . renders the squalid beauty and blunt power of nature through her accounts of itinerant farm work. As someone who works the land, I shared in her pleasure for ‘labouring outside with its attendant sensations both plain and deep.’”—Rose Higham Stainton, The White Review
“Lovers of sumptuous prose, rejoice. Pig Years delivers an intimate look inside the world of young, semi-itinerant farmers. . . . Gaydos’ debut announces her as a major new voice in nonfiction. You might find yourself devouring the book in one sitting, as this reviewer did.”—Benjamin Aleshire, Seven Days
“A prose poem, stained in love and death, honest and unsparing, and deeply empathetic. Gorgeous — an intimate chronicle of the physical, mental and spiritual labor required to sustain small farms, where there is nothing theoretical about the food chain and its costs . . . The most spiritual of the books. The writing! Immediate, sensual, very personal, evocative . . . A memoir of the trials and small glories of modern-day small-scale farming in America, beautifully written, harrowing, honest, eye-opening, poetic.”—2023 Art of Eating Prize Judges
“[Pig Years is] unapologetic and sure-footed. Here is an author who can transport readers into the lush fecundity of raising and tending to pigs, but without the omission of the brutality of their ultimate slaughter. . . . The rhythm and inevitability of it, so lyrically rendered by Gaydos, form the music of this book. . . . The book is a vivid indictment of this human drive to consume, but it is also a reprieve in its recognition of our inevitable interconnectedness with what we seek to subjugate.”—Rafia Zakaria, Air Mail
“Careful, controlled and exquisite . . . [Gaydos’] tone is serious, her prose laced with gorgeous description. . . . Pig Years is an unsparing look at a tough way of living. Gaydos is careful to bleed any romance out of the hard, hard work of farming, yet stripped to its essence, its meaning and its importance, she reveals it to be a beautiful thing.”—Laurie Hertzel, Star Tribune
“Vivid . . . Meticulous and enlivened . . . Gaydos is a writer of such vigorous eloquence that you’ll find yourself riveted. . . . The memoir imparts an abiding sense of the gravity of these acts—of raising, tending, and killing animals; of planting, nurturing, and harvesting vegetables—that lends an almost sacred quality to Gaydos’s prose. . . . Gaydos illuminates a traditional way of life—one of grueling labor, physical exhaustion, and ravenous hunger, filled with challenges yet punctuated by exhilarating joys—that is, in our era of material carelessness, emotional detachment, and spiritual confusion, a reminder of life’s elemental urgency, and, amid the magnified minutiae of each day, its astonishing beauty.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
“The rhythms of Ellyn Gaydos’s new memoir, Pig Years, are the rhythms of nature, of life itself and, yes, death, too. No wonder the book, with its slow burn of uncomfortable facts and sober truth, burrows under the reader’s skin.”—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Chances Are
“Ellyn Gaydos's accounts of her pigs and the farms they live on are told with studied compassion and exquisitely observed detail. She brings us intimately into the vital, unrelenting work of a small produce farm; we feel, with her, the biting cold and the weight of the mud, as well as the peaceful intervals of rest and human companionship. With crystalline expression, Gaydos relates her experience of a dedicated farmer's life, and her very personal testimony is an engrossing pleasure.”—Lydia Davis, author of Essays: One and Essays: Two
“Pig Years is a pulsing, keen, and startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals. Its paragraphs conjure the fecundity of life, the brutality of loss, and the grace of a life lived in the grooves of the seasons.”—Anthony Doerr, author of Cloud Cuckoo Land and All the Light We Cannot See
“A richy, earthy, aromatic book. It melts like a morsel of raw meat on the tongue. Ellyn Gaydos’ powerful debut is a kind of devotional text, a dark pastoral with the shadow of death cast across every page—all the better to see the light glinting through. Compulsive reading—I picked it up and simply couldn't put it down.” —Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
“Ellyn Gaydos does the rare, important work of capturing rural America not in the shadow of urban spaces but standing in its own light. Pig Years gets right to the severe truths that farmers know: fresh blood is bright, butchers are often gentle souls, and survival is always a temporary state. Gaydos writes with the exquisite directness of Nature herself.”—Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland
“Pig Years is a lush account of the everyday splendor of small-farm work, from the soil to the slop, from the blades of machinery to the bodies of animals in rut. It is a love song to this labor, and to the physicality of the world.”—Eula Biss, author of Having and Being Had and Notes from No Man’s Land
“Pig Years is a marvel of a memoir—one to be savored. Gaydos shoulders bounty and despair with grace, modeling a radiant sense of interdependence. This book showcases a most vibrant and heartful almanac of sorts—you can hear and smell the pull of vegetables and the boots tromping around the muck and mud so clearly, you too will herald these seasons spent working and tending the land.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
“Pig Years by Ellyn Gaydos is delicious with brilliance and rot and green fire. We hear much about place-based writing, and that’s in here, done wonderfully. But what most helps Gaydos’ work shine is the daily and honest realization that the heart is a place, too. Please read this messy, beautiful book.”—Rick Bass, author of For a Little While
